call back.
Arkadian smiled for the first time in hours. Liv was OK. She obviously had an American version of himself looking out for her, and that made him feel a whole lot better. Moving down to the next item on his ‘To Do’ list, he punched in an extension number and covered his other ear to shut out the noise of the room.
‘Cell-block security desk.’
‘Suleiyman? It’s Arkadian.’
‘Hey, I thought you was off sick with lead poisoning?’
‘Yeah, well, that didn’t really work out. Half the city’s been robbed, so who can sit at home watching game shows?’
‘Better than the stuff I get to watch all day. How’s the arm?’
‘Hurts. Listen, could you call up the camera feeds around the time of the breakout yesterday so I can come down and take a look?’
‘Er… no, actually I can’t. We only just got the full systems up and running again, and several files are missing.’
‘Which ones?’
‘Everything from yesterday afternoon.’
Arkadian felt his cop’s instincts tingle. ‘Any chance you could restore them?’
‘No. The files haven’t been corrupted — they’re not there. The backup system must have failed.’
‘Has this sort of thing ever happened before?’
‘No — first time.’
‘Any idea what might have caused it?’
Suleiyman exhaled like a builder pricing up a tricky job. ‘Could be lots of things: there was a load of water dumped in the cells when the sprinklers went off, that might have tripped something; the system’s a piece of crap anyway and is always breaking down; plus we just had a major earthquake — take your pick.’
Arkadian suspected it was none of these. It was too convenient and the files that were missing too specific. ‘OK, thanks, Suleiyman. Let me know if they show up.’
‘Will do, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.’
He replaced the phone and glanced up at the busy room, wondering if whoever had destroyed them was standing here now. A beep drew his attention to the screen. He had a match. The top sheet of a service record filled the screen with a photograph of a slight man in glasses in one corner. He didn’t look anything like the officer Arkadian had seen lying dead on the street. The only things that did match were the name, the badge number, and the fact that both men were dead. The real Sub-Inspector Nesim Senturk had served in the main metropolitan district of the Istanbul police force and been killed in the line of duty over a year ago during a raid on a drug trafficker. Whoever was now lying on the slab in the Ruin city morgue was an impostor, slotted into the guard detail with a genuine name and badge number by someone with access to the police files. Whoever was behind all this was clearly knowledgeable, powerful and well connected.
The desk phone rang, cutting through the din of the room.
‘Arkadian!’ he answered, clamping it to one ear and his hand to the other.
‘Yeah, this is Sergeant Godlewski from the New Jersey PD. I got a message to call about Liv Adamsen.’
Arkadian switched to English. ‘Yes, thanks for getting back so quickly.’
‘Do you know where she’s gone?’
The question threw Arkadian. ‘I thought she was with you?’
‘She was. I dropped her off at a safe hotel a few hours ago, but I just got here to check she was OK and she’s gone. All her stuff’s gone too and the room is a mess.’
Then Ski told him about the pages torn from a Bible and Arkadian felt a coldness creep over him as he realized who had her.
69
The modified McDonnell Douglas DC-9 lifted off from Newark International Airport and began its rapid climb into the early-afternoon sky.
On the outside it appeared to be a regular charter flight, the only distinguishing markings being a light blue logo with a white dove on the tail that looked like a scrap of a better day, sliding across the flat, grey sky. Inside, it hardly resembled a plane at all. The seating section had been ripped out and replaced with a double layer of steel cot beds running almost the entire length of the plane. At the back a separate section was kitted out as a fully functioning operating room.
The DC-9 belonged to the White Dove Organization, a global, Church-run charity that flew extreme trauma victims and other civilian cases out of war-torn countries to be treated in state-of-the-art Western facilities. The plane averaged three round-trip flights a week with almost all the patient traffic being inbound. For the outgoing journeys it served as a transport plane, so for this flight all the bunks had been stripped of their mattresses and turned into large shelving racks that were stacked solid with boxes of medical supplies and other equipment.
The solitary patient was at one end, strapped to a lower bunk. Three seatbelts stretched across the knees, waist and chest, and thin arms stretched out either side of the body, mummified in bandages that also crept around the neck and wrapped the head. A gel mask covered the face, indicating that the patient had suffered some kind of severe facial trauma as well as extensive damage to the arms and torso.
The medical carnet detailing the patient’s history was in a zip-lock bag tied to the side of the bed along with a passport that identified her as Annie Lieberman, a missionary from Ohio, who had been brutally raped and mutilated then set on fire and left for dead by rebel soldiers in Guinea, West Africa. The immigration officer who had come on board prior to their departure had checked the documents but hadn’t bothered to unwrap the bandages or lift the mask. Burn victims never looked like their photographs anyway, so there was little point. Her notes said she had been receiving treatment at the Burn Center at Saint Barnabas in New Jersey and was now on her way to undergo genital- and breast-reconstruction surgery in a specialized clinic in Bangkok. He had blanched when he read the details and quickly signed the necessary paperwork to send them on their way.
The plane banked now as it broke through clouds, flooding the interior with slowly moving shafts of light as it levelled off and headed east. Part of the plane’s modifications had been to add extra fuel tanks, giving it a much longer range than the standard factory model, but at seven and a half thousand nautical miles, the flight to Bangkok was still too far in a single hop. Consequently their flight plan included one re-fuelling stop at Gaziantep International Airport in Southern Turkey.
Liv lay in the cot bed, awake but not awake. She was aware of the hum and vibration of the engines. She could feel the pressure of the bindings holding her in place and there was also something on her face, pressing down on her skin. She tried to move her arm to feel what it was, but nothing happened. She tried to open her eyes, but they too remained shut. It was as if the communicating lines between her brain and her body had been severed, robbing her of all movement but leaving her mind alert. A sensory memory surfaced and she started to hyperventilate. She’d known these things before. Claustrophobia. Confinement. Pain. They were things so raw and familiar they felt like part of her. Yet even as she remembered them she knew they were not her memories. They belonged to the thing she now carried inside her, like a dark child she must deliver safely before time ran out for both of them. She remembered the dream of the dragon, and felt its presence nearby, waiting to consume the child, just as the passage in the Book of Revelation had predicted. Then something was lifted from her face and a voice whispered in her ear.
‘Don’t try to talk,’ it said, ‘and don’t try to move: you won’t be able to and it will only cause you distress. You’ve been paralysed by a drug called Suc-cinyl-cho-line. But don’t worry, it will start to wear off pretty soon.’
She felt pressure on her eyelids as he placed his thumb and forefinger on them and gently prised them open. Bright light seared into her head and she found herself looking up not at some biblical beast but at the massive silhouette of a man. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘Soon have you home again, back where you belong.’
His words sank in and the panic returned. He continued to talk but Liv was no longer listening. All she could hear was the whispering noise rushing through her, drowning everything out like a scream, bringing images of the spike-lined Tau in the chapel of the Sacrament. Her skin prickled painfully at the memory of it and fear burned
